30 March 2012 2:55 PM

Is the Obama administration using either leaks or black propaganda to sabotage Israel’s defence against the threat of genocide? America’s former ambassador to the UN John Bolton certainly thinks so – and he is not a man given to rash speculation.

An article on the website of Foreign Policy magazine last Wednesday, written by former unofficial Yasser Arafat adviser and established Israel-basher Mark Perry, quoted four unnamed ‘senior diplomats’ and ‘intelligence officers’ saying that Israel had been granted access to air bases in Azerbaijan on Iran’s northern border. The article suggested that this meant Israel planned to use Azerbaijan either for a strike at Iran or for other support for such an attack.

An Azeri official has subsequently said the claim that Azerbaijan has granted Israel access to its air bases for an attack is ‘absurd and groundless’. That denial, however, is clearly limited. And several observers have concluded that whether this is a genuine leak or disinformation, the story is an attempt to harm Israel by its principal western ally. Indeed, assuming it is not a total fabrication but is based on actual briefings, it is hard to conclude anything else.

‘I think this leak today is part of the administration’s campaign against an Israeli attack.’ ... Bolton, a Fox News contributor, noted that a strike launched from Azerbaijan would be much easier for the Israelis than a strike launched from their own country -- jets could stay over their targets longer and worry less about refueling. But he said tipping the Israelis’ hand by revealing “very sensitive, very important information” could frustrate such a plan.

...“Clearly, this is an administration-orchestrated leak,” Bolton told FoxNews.com. “This is not a rogue CIA guy saying I think I’ll leak this out. It’s just unprecedented to reveal this kind of information about one of your own allies.”

‘What reasonable interest does someone in the Pentagon have in hardening the Iranian pharaoh’s heart on the eve of Passover, and indicating to him that he has nothing to fear? This borders on insanity.’

Sabotaging an ally’s defences in this manner goes much further than Obama’s previous known position in trying to stop an Israeli attack on Iran. This actively assists Iran, and thus potentially places the lives of millions at risk from that regime’s deranged belligerency. Is this what Obama meant when he tried to reassure American Jews recently that

‘...when the chips are down, I have Israel’s back’?

And since Iran does not merely threaten Israel but is already at war with America and the west it has pledged to destroy, is this not in fact a knife in the back of the west itself?

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26 March 2012 10:59 AM

Rogue operative? Not a bit of it. Anyone wondering just how the Conservative party could have appointed as its Co-Treasurer a man who offered access to the Prime Minister at private dinners and other privileged contacts in return for party donations of £250,000 will have had their answer from the jaw-dropping interview on this morning’s BBC Radio Today programme with the Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude.

They see nothing wrong in it.

Of course the Prime Minister had held dinners in Downing Street for some big donors, said Maude – but these were for his friends, in his private residence.

Excuse me? ‘Private'? The official residence of the Prime Minister? Would he at least provide the names or even the numbers of all donors who had been thus entertained at Downing Street, he was asked, so that it could be seen whether these were indeed all merely personal friends? Of course not.

If someone gave £100,000+ to the Tory party, Maude was asked, could they expect to meet David Cameron? Yes they could, was the breezy reply. There was nothing wrong with giving such access to party donors: they had always been completely open about that.

On this, Maude was correct. Buying access to Tory party bigwigs is an established business. As the Times (£) reports:

‘For £50,000 a year, members of the party’s Leader’s Group were invited to “join David Cameron and other senior figures at dinners, post-PMQ [Prime Minister’s Questions] lunches, drinks receptions and important campaign lunches”.

‘The Leader’s Group is the most exclusive of seven Conservative donor clubs. Founded when Mr Cameron was in Opposition, it has continued to offer access to him after he became Prime Minister, a Conservative spokesman confirmed last night — though he said that he did not “have a breakdown” of how many meetings took place between the group’s members and Mr Cameron last year.

‘... “It’s very discreet and nicely done,” Neil Record, chairman of Record Currency Management, said in 2009. “You get 10 people around the table. There will be five minutes from David about what they want to do. And then it’s any questions.”

‘A £25,000 donation earns membership to the “Treasurer’s Group” which offers the chance to meet lesser members of the Tory Cabinet. For £10,000 supporters can join the Renaissance Forum which offers the chance to circulate with “eminent speakers from the world of business”.’

But the fact that it is so brazen doesn’t make it right. Maude says:

‘There’s nothing remotely improper about that’.

Au contraire – there’s nothing remotely proper about it. Buying access to politicians is simply corrupt. The fact that the practice is defended without a blush and indeed institutionalised merely suggests that the Conservative Party is utterly amoral.

According to Maude, however:

‘People will put forward ideas whether they’re donors or not. And do you really want to have politicians who refuse to listen to other people’s ideas...What is being alleged here is that you can buy influence, you can buy policy, and that is simply not the case.’

Such disingenuousness is astounding. Maude sees no difference between, on the one hand, people giving money to a politicalparty in order to bend the ear of government ministers, and on the other the normal flow of ideas from people who have not bought influence.

And bending the PM’s ear isn’t influence? As anonymous sources have been telling reporters, donors to political parties don’t give money for nothing. They expect a quid pro quo. That quid pro quo is access to the Prime Minister and other government bigwigs, which they believe is valuable. Maybe some of them just get a thrill to be invited into the inner sanctum of power. But to dismiss any influence as out of the question stretches credulity to breaking point. Indeed, as one businessman told the Times this morning, the reason such donors give to politicians

'is to guarantee access where there is no civil servant present.'

In other words, the whole point is to gain access to the PM and other government bigwigs at a private event, so that what is said goes totally unrecorded. But why should such secrecy be considered important if neither the donor nor the politician has anything to hide?

And so what exactly did Peter Cruddas do that was so ‘completely unacceptable’, according to the Prime Minister, other than raise the party’s price?

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21 March 2012 12:15 PM

When the Toulouse school massacre happened, the media rushed to say that the perpetrator was a white far-right racist. The lone gunman had mown down at close range a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school, wounding several others. He was thought to be the same killer who a few days earlier had murdered three black French paratroopers in two separate attacks. A killer who targeted Jews and blacks – must be a far-right white racist, right?

Wrong. The suspect who the French police have now cornered turns out to be a jihadi Islamic terrorist with self-declared links to al Qaeda, who has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past. Well, there’s a surprise.

Jews throughout the world are all potential targets for attack in a terrifying manifestation of global incitement to murder. Islamists regularly declare their intention to kill Jews wherever they can find them. Hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza at southern Israel over the past couple of weeks bear out daily the frenzied attempt to murder as many Jews as possible. In the Mumbai massacre in 2008, it turned out that the attack on the tiny ultra-orthodox Lubavitch centre was for the Islamic perpetrators of that atrocity the most important target. There have been repeated Islamic terrorist attempts on Jewish targets around the world. Oh -- and Islamists have been murdering black people in Libya because they are black.

Yet all this is ignored by the mainstream media. Desperate to sanitise Muslim genocidal terrorism and prove that racism and Jew-hatred is confined to white people and the ‘far right’, the media simply did not entertain the possibility that the perpetrator of the French killings might have been a Muslim. So a range of likely perpetrators was canvassed – but they were all variations on white racists.

And even when the perpetrator turned out to be an Islamic terrorist the media were still trying to spin it away, with Sky News stressing the deprivation of the killer and his family and interviewing a French female journalist living in London who claimed that this was ‘an attack against diversity’. As blogger Edgar Davidson observed here:

‘She said that it was all down to the racist climate in France which had been made worse by Nikolas Sarkozy in the last five years and she picked out, as an example of racist lack of tolerance, the burka ban he had introduced.’

Not only are the media and ‘progressive’ commentators in the west desperate to sanitise Islamic terrorism and genocidal incitement; they also join in. The Toulouse jihadist said he was

‘seeking revenge for Palestinian children and French military postings overseas.’

But no Palestinian children have ever been targeted by Israel for murder. Quite the reverse: Israel regularly puts its own soldiers in harm’s way in order to any minimise civilian casualties in military operations against Palestinian terrorists and their infrastructure which it undertakes solely to protect its own people from further murderous Palestinian attacks. Any Palestinian child casualties in such operations occur solely as a tragic and inadvertent by-product of war – and as often as not because the Palestinians have put their own children in harm’s way.

Yet this deranged belief that the Israelis deliberately kill Palestinian children is not only pumped out daily by the Arab and Muslim world inciting their people to hate Jews and to murder them as a holy act; not only do western progressives ignore this incitement and pretend instead that Islamic terrorism arises from legitimate ‘grievances’; these same western progressives themselves pump out precisely the same lies and incitement -- and then suggest that the deliberate murder of Jewish innocents is the moral equivalent of attempts by Israel to prevent the slaughter of yet more innocents.

Thus the EU foreign affairs chief, the British Baroness Ashton, seemed to equate the murder of the French Jews in Toulouse with the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza in Israeli military operations there. Although the EU now claims she was misunderstood and that she was merely referring to all violence against children, that does not let her off the hook – indeed, by underscoring the fundamental amorality of the remark, it not only attaches Lady Ashton to that hook yet more firmly but also now attaches the EU itself. And now Hamas itself, no less, has sprung to her defence:

‘“Ashton’s declarations are worthy of appreciation and support due to Israel’s attempts to pressure her,” said a senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, on his Facebook page.’

‘No-one will ever know whether the tragedy in Toulouse would not have taken place if the atmosphere were different. But we can say that history teaches that mass demonisation can all too easily lead to the dehumanisation of the group or people or nation that is being demonised. From there it is only one single step to the belief that murder itself can be justified.’

The terrorist who carried out the French killings may now have been caught. But those in the west who provide an echo chamber for the diabolical discourse that incubates genocide have yet to be brought to account.

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16 March 2012 3:10 PM

In 2009, the Obama administration began instructing gun storeowners to break the law by selling firearms to suspected criminals. Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were then ordered -- according to testimony by ATF agents turned whistleblowers -- not to intercept the smugglers but rather to let the guns cross the U.S.-Mexican border and into the hands of Mexican drug-trafficking organizations. One tragic if eminently foreseeable outcome was that some of these firearms sent to arm Mexican drug runners were used in a gun battle with the US Border Patrol, during which a Border Patrol agent was killed. You can read about this scandal in Forbes magazine. The scandal is known by the code-name ‘Fast and Furious’.

Imagine, then, the astonishment when, as can be seen on this video, UK Prime Minister David Cameron was asked what he made of the basketball game he had just watched with President Obama, he replied that he thought the game was

‘fast and furious’.

This has thrown elements of the blogosphere into a tailspin, as can be seen here on Breitbart. What, folk in the US are asking each other excitedly, could have been behind Mr Cameron’s amazing reference?

Well, here are a few possibilities (including some canvassed elsewhere):

Coincidence

Act of God (he’s not an Obama fan; probably a Republican)

Thought transference (yup, they’re that close)

On his mind because Obama has been confiding in him about F&F and, well, it kinda just slipped out

Sly way of slipping knife into Obama’s back

None of the above

Well, sorry guys, but the last gets my vote. ‘Fast and furious’ is an idiomatic phrase commonly used in England. David Cameron almost certainly used this phrase when watching the basketball game because, as an Englishman, that’s how the game appeared to him to be – fast and furious.

Obama was hardly likely to have been confiding in him about this scandal which so graphically reveals – uh, how to put this, Prime Minister? – that Obama really has ‘reset the moral authority’ of the US government: to zero. Nor is it remotely likely that Cameron would use such an occasion for a sly but very public dig.

No, what’s overwhelmingly likely is that Cameron unwittingly chose a phrase which not only perfectly summed up the game to which he had just been introduced, but just happened to be the shorthand term for a scandal which shows up Obama’s zero moral authority. So the President’s British guest for whom he laid on a 19-gun salute and a state banquet as his ‘friend’, and who in return delivered three days of slavering obsequiousness, just happened to have inadvertently drawn the attention of the American public to the one thing Obama would seek to bury for ever.

Whoops. How's that special relationship thingy playing for ya, Mr President?

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The UK Prime Minister David Cameron this week told a state dinner thrown by the President of the United States in his honour that Barack Obama had

‘pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world’.

Is that so? Let’s see now. President Obama has:

Neutered American power abroad and extended the reach of the state at home

Appeased Iran while dumping on its designated target of annihilation, Israel

Appeased the Palestinians while dumping on the state they vow to destroy, Israel

Given Iran time to bring its genocide nuclear bomb to fruition

Helped consolidate in power the repressive and murderous Iranian regime by ignoring the plight of its political dissidents, women, gays and other victims of Iranian state terror

Allowed Iran to become the regional hegemon, thus in turn pushing moderate Arab states into its arms

Empowered the fanatical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Arab world

Helped bring to power a regime in Egypt which is oppressive to its own people and hostile to Israel and the west

Helped bring to power a regime in Libya which is oppressive to its own people and hostile to Israel and the west

Stood by and done nothing while President Assad butchers untold thousands of Syrian citizens

Surrendered in Afghanistan

Abandoned Iraq to the enemies of the west

Downplayed Islamist aggression at home, eg by declaring the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, where an Islamist terrorist killed 13 American soldiers and wounded 29 more, ‘work place violence’ not a terrorist attack

Taken the side of Argentinian aggression against Britain over the Falkland Islands (at least until this week when he agreed to return to a neutral position)

Sought to deny freedom of religious conscience at home by forcing Catholics to sign up to abortion and contraception services (and his backtracking compromise was scarcely any better)

Attacked free enterprise, as in his blockage of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, while ruinously increasing American debt through public spending designed to increase state power over people’s lives.

And more.

When David Cameron tells us that Barack Obama has

‘pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world’,

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09 March 2012 9:42 AM

Anyone who remains blissfully unaware of what passes in Britain for debate about Iran might like to listen here to Wednesday evening’s edition of BBC Radio Four’s The Moral Maze, on which I am a regular panellist.

The show – whose somewhat misunderstood purpose is not so much to discuss an issue in the round as test individual arguments to destruction – featured two particularly illuminating contributions by Professor Michael Clarke, Director-General of the prestigious Royal United Services Institute, and Dr David Rodin, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, University of Oxford.

Prof Clarke, who by virtue of his position is one of Britain’s top military analysts, blithely asserted that Iran would not pass the nuclear threshold for another three to four years. On what evidential basis does he put this point so much further down the line than US or Israeli estimates? And anyway, the real point about the dilemma of whether or when to attack Iran is surely not when it might go nuclear, but at what point it becomes impossible to stop it from going nuclear.

He argued that Israel and the west should hold back until Iran gets to that nuclear threshold. But once it has done so, would it not be by definition too late to stop it? He claimed an attack on Iran now would be illegal, because a pre-emptive strike can only legally take place to stop an ‘imminent’ attack. So it would seem that, according to his own argument, even if Iran has arrived at the nuclear threshold attacking it would still be illegal unless an attack by it was ‘imminent’.

But from the point of view of Israel – for whose position as Iran’s principal target Prof Clarke expressed due sympathy -- waiting for signs of an ‘imminent’ attack by Iran is as idiotic a proposal as it is suicidal. ‘Imminent’ means in practice it would be too late to stop it. And does he really expect Israel to know when Iran loads up its nuclear warhead to strike Tel Aviv – or equips a suicide bomber with a nuke in a suitcase?

Moreover, what was even more remarkable was that neither Prof Clarke nor anyone on his side of this argument seemed to grasp that Iran was already attacking Israel, through Hezbollah, Hamas and other terror groupings. It has also been attacking western interests for some three decades; it has been providing weapons to attack coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one of its bombs was probably responsible for the killing of six British soldiers in Afghanistan this week. It is astonishing, in fact, that the west has chosen not not defend itself against all these attacks but continues to pretend that war with Iran is some kind of hypothetical possibility. For Israel, Iran already is not only an imminent threat but is already waging against it a war of intended annihilation, against which Israel is most certainly entitled to defend itself under international law.

The same inexplicable disregard of Iran’s record of aggression, with a resulting desperate confusion between aggressor and victim, was displayed by Dr Rodin. He thought that, in some aspects, Iran was merely making a rational response to the west’s own nuclear capability. It was the west’s possession of nuclear weapons, apparently, which was causing Iran to make its own. So it was the west’s fault, was it, that Iran was threatening to wipe Israel off the map and announcing the religious duty of all Muslims to destroy Israel and kill all Jews everywhere? Dr Rodin seemed taken aback when that was put to him. But that was the inescapable conclusion from what he was saying.

There were other similarly eye-popping opinions on this show. The view was expressed that Iran was no different from any other rogue, unstable state and just as likely to adhere to the unspoken assumptions of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ that kept the peace during the Cold War. The fact that the Iranian regime is dominated by those who believe that by bringing about the apocalypse they will return the Shia messiah to earth, and consequently that they would welcome even the destruction of half of Iran to that end, was brushed aside.

At the root of this gross dislocation from reality lies the core western cultural fallacy – the assumption that everyone in the world is a rational actor who acts in his own self-interest. The result of this mistake is a catastrophic inability to understand the existential threat to the west. Listen to the show in order to understand just what the formerly lion-hearted Britain has now become.

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06 March 2012 8:07 PM

The British government is currently tearing itself apart over its proposal to cut Child Benefit for households where the wage-earner brings in more than £42,745 per year. Apparently, this is dividing the Prime Minister, David Cameron, from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.

Osborne wants to cut the benefit because a) it will reduce public spending and b) it hits higher earners, thus fulfilling the Cameroons’ political imperative to be seen to ‘fair’ in spreading the pain of austerity to the better-off (you may think this is a cynical and self-defeating gimmick borrowed from the politics of envy in order to suck up spinelessly to the left, but there it is).

The Prime Minister, however, is queasy – as well he should be -- about a) further punishing the not-so-wealthy middle-class who already shoulder a disproportionate burden of taxation, and b) punishing stay-at-home mothers, since two-earner couples whose separate incomes individually fall below the proposed Child Benefit cut-off will still get the wretched benefit, even though their joint income is far above that of the couple whose sole salary happens to be above the cut-off limit.

Such a manifestly unfair anomaly shows why means-testing is in general a really bad idea. But beyond that, I would say that Child Benefit itself was always a really bad idea, and real reform should get rid of it altogether.

This is because it rewards the wrong thing. It incentivises having children, whereas the state should only incentivise having children in circumstances which are advantageous for society. Since Child Benefit is awarded with the birth of every child regardless of circumstances, it has put rocket fuel behind Britain’s astronomical rate – and rising – of fatherless children born to elective lone mothers.

The rationale for this is, first, that welfare benefits should be focused on solving child poverty. This totally ignores the fact that lone parenthood is itself a major cause of child poverty; and no less important, that even more than material goods children desperately need their fathers.

The second great cry that went up when Child Benefit was first introduced was that benefits for children should be given to the mother alone, because men are feckless no-goods and would only blow such money on drink and fags. And then people were surprised that young men felt marginalised and felt no need to anchor themselves to a wife!

The unmentionable fact is that Child Benefit has been a disaster and should be replaced by incentives for marriage in the tax and benefits system -- incentives which in turn do not penalise single-earner households. But that, of course, would require courage to face down the shibboleths of the left. And that is one thing that the Cameron government shows a near-pathological aversion to displaying.